Abstract
An intellectual history can trace the movement of an idea into, and out of, the academic mainstreams of its time. Less often, it might turn its gaze on ideas that never gained widespread acceptance but remained and remain esoteric. Such marginal works are of value to historians in so far as they allow us to tentatively trace the margins of a past intellectual community. Few scholars can have inhabited these margins, and built more spectacular intellectual edifices there, than Lieutenant-Colonel Professor Laurence Austine Waddell.